§ Statement of Purpose

The View from 1776 presents a framework to understand present-day issues from the viewpoint of the colonists who fought for American independence in 1776 and wrote the Constitution in 1787. Knowing and preserving those understandings, what might be called the unwritten constitution of our nation, is vital to preserving constitutional government. Without them, the bare words of the Constitution are just a Rorschach ink-blot that politicians, educators, and judges can interpret to mean anything they wish.

"We have no government armed with the power capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by morality and true religion. Our constitution is made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams, to the Officers of the First Brigade, Third Division, Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798.

§ Decline of Western Civilization: a Snapshot

§ Books to Read

§ BUY MY BOOK

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Make Christianity More Than A Hobby

Sunday’s sermon at the Cohocton Assembly of God Church was delivered by Elder Joel Martin. His principal text was from the Book of Matthew:

1Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: 2"The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. 3So you must obey them and do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. 4They tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

Aside From That, Is Everything OK?

Tom Emerson alerted me to this report, the conclusions of which are summarized below.

A large number of climate “scientists” have, for years, systematically, knowingly, embezzled taxpayers’ funds via government research grants. They and the organizations that abetted their activities should be subjected to criminal penalties and compelled to repay all of their government grant monies.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Obama’s Priorities

Homeland security apparently isn’t among the president’s priorities. He’s too busy with a bill of attainder to criminalize legal conduct of CIA agents after the fact. Socializing the entire economy, of course, remains at the apex of his goals.

Obama’s 17% Unemployment Rate

...the so-called stimulus actually has increased unemployment and delayed the recovery that economists were predicting last year. Mr. Obama’s claim that stimulus spending has saved jobs is based on bogus economics. Stephen Bronars, a labor economist at the University of Texas at Austin, pointed out to us that the stimulus doesn’t create new spending. “This money would have been spent someplace else [if the government hadn’t spent it],” he explained. The government is merely moving jobs from some firms to others and from some sectors to others, and in the process it causes extra temporary unemployment as workers are moved around.

Mr. Obama’s top-down manhandling of the economy is based on the assumption that government knows best, and that private businesses would be in better shape if they did what the bureaucracy tells them to do. Even the tax breaks the president proposes are flawed because they attempt to micromanage business decisions rather than lowering marginal tax rates for companies. This is because the president thinks he knows more about where companies should be investing than their executives.

Quote Of The Day

For an administration that claims to know its political history, the White House appears to have misread at least one decade. FDR was re-elected in 1936 for many reasons, but among them was his fiery denunciations of “economic royalists,” “economic tyranny,” and “economic slavery.” Business knew it was in the president’s crosshairs and put its capital on strike. The economy didn’t recover until the war.

Team Obama is already witnessing a repeat. The U.S. economy ought to be flying out of recession. Yet bank lending is sluggish. Companies refuse to hire. Business is going elsewhere to raise capital: China last year outstripped the U.S. as a center for initial public offerings. The market gyrates on Washington’s latest political drama.

A venture capitalist recently remarked to me that the uncertainty the administration has created is “nothing short of paralyzing.” Nobody will invest in an industry that might be the next to be overtaxed, overregulated, or publicly disemboweled.

Add to that uncertainty the administration’s new populist bent, and it’s a recipe for a continued capital freeze. “People in the economy are thinking about whether to invest or take risks when what they are seeing are early signs of Hugo Ch

The Arsonist Blames the Fire Department

Jobs are outsourced precisely because of strangling government regulations, higher corporate taxes than anywhere else, and government support for the extortions of socialist labor unions. Never-ceasing government intervention has made the United States no longer competitive on world markets in too many product categories.

Obama’s solution is to bury the nation under debt, bankrupt private business, and have everybody working for his socialist government bureaucracies in so-called green jobs, green in the sense of corrosive fungi.

Congressional Budget Office Foresees Long, Slow Recovery

Congressional Budget Office officials forecast official unemployment averaging above 10 % this year and in 2011. Actual unemployment, including people who have stopped looking for jobs, is close to 17%.

Annual budget deficits, already at unprecedented high levels, will be greater than $1 trillion for years to come. The president’s recently proposed budget freeze will amount to very little, prospectively reducing budgeted Federal spending increases from 45% to 44.3% over the next ten years.